Geografie znevýhodnění

Abstract

This third chapter offers a Czech introduction to a subdiscipline of social geography – disability geography, its development and main research topics. It also grounds the whole book and our project in a broader thinking about the relationship between space and the body. In between the general beginning towards a concrete ending of this book, it turns our attention from the study of disability to space and shows how space participates on social disadvantage and this disadvantage is inscribed in space. The chapter focuses on the interactions of diverse bodies with diverse space and notices, what these interactions enable and what they disable, and how certain spaces participate in dis/abling and enabling of certain bodies. The question resonating through the whole book is “how space participates on disadvantaging of our bodies”, or “how diversity of our bodies translates into the form of space”? The chapter is divided into two parts; the first one discusses geography of disability and tries to show how discussions within disability studies are transferred with some delay into disability geography, where they interact with the research on space. The second part is devoted to three selected examples of space experience: the experience of people with physical impairment, the experience of people with sight impairment and the experience of „d/Deaf“ people. Each of the examples discusses two or three broader topics that have represented or might represent key research streams of the respective spatial experience. Thus, first example introduces research on space accessibility and everyday experience of wheelchair users, the example of people with sight impairment mentions imagining space, and the influence of assistive technologies and weather on experience with space, and the example of “d/Deaf” people comments on identity research, DeafSpace, and virtual space. The end of the chapter connects the two parts and concludes by presenting the phases of disability geography that study the mentioned topics.